Earlier this week, I posted to our site a YouTube video of G. Edward Griffin explaining how the Communists manipulated racial divisions in America as early as the 1920’s. The same methods are being employed right now as a means of tearing the country apart.
Mr. Griffin’s is an important lesson that can help all red-blooded Americans to resist and rebuff this corrosive agenda, but I would like to push the point much further in these present lines. What I propose in this Ad Rem is that the one and only remedy to this problem is the Catholicity of the Church.
In his remarkable book, Labido Dominandi, Dr. E. Michael Jones discusses at some length the Jamaican immigrant and Harlem Renaissance poet, Claude McKay. McKay was a “proxy warrior” used by certain wealthy white leftists who were his patrons. In addition to his dabbling in Communism that took him on a sacred pilgrimage to the Soviet Union during some months of 1922–23, McKay was also a sexual revolutionary who abandoned his wife and daughter in order to pursue a promiscuous life of venereal pleasure. His Soviet sojourn took place during that little remembered era of the early Communist war on the family which made Russia into a playground for reckless venereal decadence, and so it was that McKay contracted a bad case of syphilis during that trip, necessitating a move to Paris where he could get safe medical treatment.
Mention of this particular brand of immorality is not without purpose here. It is important when we consider that revolutionaries in general use sexual license to accomplish their destruction of traditional societies: The Jacobins legalized divorce. The Bolsheviks legalized abortion. The Mexican revolutionaries in the time of Padre Pro imposed radical sex education on their country’s schoolchildren. The revolutionaries in our own day have employed no-fault divorce, abortion, contraception, sex ed, AIDS ed, sodomy, “domestic partners,” and “transgenderism” to obliterate what remains of Christian civilization. Polyamory will be next. Sexually “liberated” (i.e., enslaved) people are ripe for the political control that revolutionaries want to exercise because they are slaves who are deluded into thinking they are actually free.
Claude McKay was brought up by a strict Presbyterian father on a Caribbean island where baptized Christians and pagans intermingled. He was early on influenced by the complete unbelief of his older brother, and in time came to view Christianity as a “white-man’s religion.” In the context of the decadence of the roaring 20’s and the contemporary Communist efforts at manipulating race relations, this meant that the moral law that Christianity preserved was also a white-man’s institution. By contrast, sexual liberation was something more in keeping with the “primitive vitality” (McKay’s words) of the African race. He had a lot to say about the sexual mores of Africans, even though he had never been to that continent, and even though the particular sexual decadence into which he had fallen — including bisexualism — was behavior he learned experientially from affluent white liberals in America, followed up by his promiscuous Russian and Parisian travels.
Thankfully, McKay’s story has a happy ending; towards the end of his life, McKay became a Catholic after being exposed to the charitable work of the Catholic Church among his own people. He may have been moved by the good example of Catholics, but his conversion was no less intellectual for it; he even engaged in apologetics to explain the need the world has for the papacy. Sadly, those decades between his bitter rejection of Protestantism and his happy acceptance of Catholicism witnessed his promotion of a false and toxic narrative of class struggle, race struggle, and untethering from the moral law in the name of race that is curiously identical to the present agenda of Black Lives Matter. “Nothing under the sun is new,” said Solomon the Wise (Eccles. 1:10). McKay’s life provides us an object lesson in the ongoing phenomenon of revolutionary manipulation at the hands of progressivist elites.
From Jamaica and Harlem, we turn briefly to Japan, where the Church was despised and persecuted as a “European religion,” and consequently produced numerous martyrs, not only of foreign missionaries, but also of native Japanese, like Blessed Leonard Kimura, Saint Paul Miki, Saint James Kisai and Saint John de Goto, along with the Mexican-born Saint Philip of Jesus. (See Evil Silence and Holy Silence for more on Japan.)
Looking at the Religion as a despised foreign import has a long pedigree, and the Japanese hold no monopoly on it. The ancient Irish pagans might attack Catholicism as being a Continental, non-Celtic import, while the twentieth-century Chinese could attack the Irish Columban missionaries for imposing an Irish religion on China — which had already been evangelized by Italians, at least one Pole, and perhaps even the Jewish Apostle, Saint Thomas. For that matter, if the Africans who had been evangelized by the French could and did at times attack Catholicism as a French Religion imposed upon them by colonial rule (for which the Guinean, Cardinal Robert Sarah, was quite grateful), the earliest French, the pagan Franks, might just as easily have despised it as a Roman Imperial religion, much as the earlier pagan Romans could and did despise it as a Jewish sect.
The fact is that, wherever it exists, the Religion came there initially as an import, being brought thither by missionaries who trace their pedigree back to Jerusalem where the Holy Ghost came upon a group of Jews hiding out in a certain Upper Room. But even in the Holy Land, the Religion was an import — brought down to earth from Heaven whence came the Son of God incarnate in the womb of a Jewish Virgin by the power of that same Holy Ghost.
Its being “foreign” or “imported” does not make the Church any less true nor any less appropriate for every place and every time after Our Lord’s advent. Among the four marks of the Church founded by Jesus Christ — one, holy, catholic, and apostolic — there is one that makes it recognizable as the one religion for all mankind: its catholicity.
By the note of catholicity (or universality), the Church is widely diffused throughout the world while yet remaining one and the same — for spacial extension and local diffusion mean nothing if the body is not one. The Biblical proofs of the Church’s catholicity (e.g., Matt. 28:18-20, Mark 16:15-16, Acts 1:8), are at the same time explicit proofs of her divine mission; such diffusion would not be possible without her proactively laboring to incorporate all men and nations into her bosom. Further, the catholicity of the Church is proof of the exclusivity of that mission, for the mandate to bring “all nations” into the one Church is by a logical necessity an exclusive one. Our Lord could not possibly have told the Apostles, “Bring all nations into my Church — and then I’ll send other churches to preach to certain nations.”
Theologians distinguish “catholicity of right” from “catholicity of fact,” the former being the right the Church has to be the one diffused among all nations, while the latter is her actual extension among all nations. In the BAC Sacrae Theologiae Summa, Father Salaverri explains “catholicity of right” in these terms:
Christ committed to one Church the right or office of gathering to herself everywhere all men, with the obligation of men corresponding to this right or office. But the catholicity of right consists in this right or office with the corresponding obligation. Therefore the Church necessarily is catholic with a catholicity of right.
It follows that no other institution or person has a right or a divine mission to preach the Gospel. It is therefore execrable, and even treasonous, when Catholics disparage as “sheep stealing” the noble attempt to convert non-Catholics — including non-Catholic Christians — to the Catholic Faith.
If it is true that the Catholic Church is that one religion all men need both to adore God in spirit and in truth, and to save their souls, it is also true that this same Church, one and universal, will manifest itself differently in different places. This is implicit in that shortest of Psalms (116): Laudate Dominum omnes gentes, laudate eum omnes populi; quoniam confirmata est super nos misericordia ejus, et veritas Domini manet in aeternum. “O praise the Lord all ye nations: praise him, all ye people. For his mercy is confirmed upon us; and the truth of the Lord remaineth forever.” This Psalm does not say that the one Church will make for “one nation” or “one people”; no, there were prophesied to be all nations and all peoples — and all tribes and tongues, too (Apoc. 7:9) — in the true Church. Each one will assimilate the same truths and the same worship in such a way that Catholicism will be at once universal and also proper to each nation in which it finds itself. This is sometimes called by the much abused name, “inculturation.”
The amazing martyrdom of the Japanese Jesuit lay Brother, Blessed Leonard Kimura, witnesses to the universality of that very Psalm I just cited, for he died singing the Laudete Dominum, fully cognizant that the Japanese people were among its omnes gentes. He was not the only Japanese martyr to make this particular Psalm his hymn of triumph.
If black lives really matter — and they do — then we should treasure those of black African descent who not only live, but live “more abundantly” (John 10:10) the supernatural life of grace. These embody not only the Church’s unity and catholicity, but also her note of holiness. There are many of them: Saint Moses the Black (whose holy utterances made their way into Cassian’s writings cited here), Saint Martin de Porres, O.P., Saint Josephine Bakhita, Blessed Mikael Gabra, and Father António Vieira, S.J.; here in the United States, there are six servants of God of African descent considered for canonization, including these three: Venerable Mother Henriette Delille, Mother Mary Lange, and Pierre Toussaint.
At Pentecost, the Holy Ghost came down to reverse the confusion introduced into the world at the Tower of Babel. Many Fathers of the Church cite the episode of the Tower of Babel as a sort of anti-antetype of Pentecost. While restoring the fundamental unity of the human race in the Mystical Body of Christ, the Holy Ghost did nothing to destroy the diversity of nations and peoples, a diversity God evidently wills as a sort of beautiful harmony within the unity of the Church.
This reminds me of the formula Brother Francis used to utter frequently: God wants one religion and many nations; Satan wants one nation (globalism) and many religions.
Authentic Catholic evangelism respects what makes us diverse as peoples and nations while uniting us in those things that are essential to our common good both in time and in eternity. If we Catholics possessed all the virtues we need to act upon that fact, we would not cede the field of battle to godless revolutionaries who can build nothing but only destroy.
